The Prince of Bromides

At first glance, South of Broad seems like your typical turgid melodrama. Suicide, rape, a murderous psychopath, beautiful women, deep friendships, languid rivers, redemptive love—cue music, cue credits ("written by Pat Conroy"), cue tears or eye rolls. Such novels can be entertaining or annoying, depending on your view, but they're basically harmless. South of Broad, though, is not. It encourages an all-too-common sin: mistaking incessant catharsis for something beneficial.

The collective experiences of finding his golden-boy brother in the bathtub with slit wrists, suffering a mental breakdown, and being arrested for possession of cocaine (planted by a bully) have inexplicably turned ugly, friendless Leo King into the sweetest, most hardworking, most loyal high-school senior in 1969 Charleston. With honesty and goodness, he breaks through the racial and class barriers that fortify the Southern city. He becomes the defender and savior of a motley group of damaged kids—orphans from the mountains, angry blacks, a pair of gorgeous and talented but traumatized twins, even a debutante or two. In each other they find harbor, hope, and friendship, perhaps the first they've ever had. But when members of the group reconvene in 1989 to help friends in danger, they find that they can't escape their tragic pasts.

Then again, these folks don't really want to. However successful they've all become, they won't stop picking at half-healed wounds—their own and those of their friends. They mix their grandiose declarations of love with come-ons and slurs. This kind of humor is often funny and lighthearted, and it's a release—a way of diffusing the real tension and prejudice that pervade Charleston. These friends can talk this way about each other and themselves precisely because no one else can. But every once in a while something or someone slips, and you realize that their voices are edged with malice. The friends occasionally hurt each other; they often hurt themselves. Conroy seems to think they're heroes—flawed, to be sure, but the best humanity has to offer. In fact, their obsessive romance of damage makes them self-indulgent and ultimately unlikable, not to mention tiresome.

Critics of Conroy usually object to his melodramatic storylines and overwrought style ("the stars winked at him in some mysterious, soul-stirring graffiti of ballet-footed light"). What's really objectionable about the purple prose, though, is that it swamps everything in a homogenizing bath of sickly beauty. It becomes harder to tell what's fresh from what's rotten, what's artificial from what's true. Even Leo recognizes this at one point, in a flash of self-awareness. "My attraction to women has always depended on ... how much scar tissue I could uncover when I started to finger my way through the ruins," he realizes. Great authors can lead us into the ruins and out again. Conroy's depiction, though, makes the scars look more like movie makeup.